“If I have to come down there, fellow citizen, you’ll spend the next three months up to your balls in bilgewater!”
3.
It was the Terror’s turn on roving blockade the next day. After a four hour rest and a breakfast of tired, cankered onions, the crew was prepared to go out for a clockwise round. As they set oars to water, Xeuthes was surprised to hear Demosthenes request permission to come aboard.
“Thank you, Captain…” the general said as he wove a zigzag course on the unstable deck. Xeuthes extended a hand to steady him.
“If you’ll take my seat at the center, General, I think you’ll be more comfortable.”
“Of course,” replied Demosthenes, who made his career campaigning overseas but resented every minute he was forced to spend afloat. He looked at Sphaerus, the old pilot, and inclined his head at him, but got no response as the old man stared ahead.
Xeuthes settled in a crouching position at the ladderway just above Stilbiades. For the next four hours, as the piper sounded a cruising cadence and the swallows bowed and flitted in the cliffs, he had an opportunity to inspect the general as the general inspected the island.
Demosthenes spared few words as they circled that blasted shore. Instead, his sharp-beaked, birdlike features seemed to respond to every cut and thrust of Sphacteria’s profile. What he would never say, but what Xeuthes might have suspected, is that the disaster at Aetolia had taught the general how topography itself could be turned against him. Here, the island was a prison for the Lacedaemonians, but it was also a kind of fortress protecting them.
He scowled at the island’s highest ground to the north-a gray eminence of bare, deeply incised stone, as high as the crag of old Pylos across the strait. The enemy, however numerous they were, would adopt that mount as their defensive strong-hold. As the ship proceeded, there seemed precious few safe places to land troops: the shoreline was either too steep, or full of rocks worn by the swirling water into a riot of bowls, arches, ruts, and crags. The water seemed to leap out of the bay to lash the stone, traceries of silver-white filling the runnels in the backwash. Near the southeast flank the ground set down into a low, pebbly strand before sweeping up toward the flat-topped southern headland. That spot seemed a serviceable landing place, but as the island’s only real beach it would undoubtedly be guarded, and require his men to clamber over the scree to reach the interior.
The Terror threaded through the strait between the big island and Little Sphacteria. The general perked up as a towering cleft appeared in the island’s mass. It was not deep enough to count as a cavern, but it cut some distance inward, and the higher reaches of the cleft rose near to ground level above.
Demosthenes turned to Xeuthes for the first time in an hour. “If there’s a way to reach the surface through there, we could land without being seen.”
“The crews lie in that hollow to rest or make repairs,” said Xeuthes. “I’ve looked at the roof of it myself-there doesn’t seem to be any way up.”
“Take me closer.”
They were now pushing up the seaward side of the island. Prospects for a landing seemed even worse there, with swells from the Ionian Sea rolling in broadside against the rocks. The trireme rocked sickeningly from beam to beam, the leather oar sleeves of the lowest bank disappearing under the surface with each pitch. Xeuthes thought nothing of it, but Demosthenes had not been on open water since he first arrived at Pylos.
“If you focus your eyes on the horizon, sir, or on the island.”
“Yes, Captain, I know…”
His voice trailed off as he saw something appear on the heights. Following his gaze, Xeuthes saw what he did: a solitary figure standing above them, silhouetted against the ascending sun. He was carrying a spear and a shield, the insignia and the color of his cloak concealed in shadow. The face of the Lacedaemonian lookout was too far away to see, but Xeuthes could feel him staring down on the Terror, impassive, as stolidly immobile as a natural feature of the landscape.
“We see them like that sometimes,” said Xeuthes. “They come out to eye us, those fearless Spartans-but never within bow range.”
Demosthenes kept his eyes on the Lacedaemonian until he was hidden behind the brow of rising ground to the north.
“If you might, I’d like you to drop me off at the stockade before you make your second round.”
4.
Spartan warriors were among the best amateur podiatrists in Greece. This was because, notwithstanding Napoleon’s famous dictum, an army marched on its feet, not its stomach. Lacedaemonians therefore lavished a quantity of time on their soles and toes that was second only to that spent on their hair.
In this regard the topography of Sphacteria presented special problems. The Lacedaemonians had landed on the island with the bare minimum: spears, shields, and the clothes on their backs. The expectation had been that there would be plenty of time to supply them later. But when the Athenians turned the tables, the lack of certain equipment, such as nail files, became urgent. The island bristled with bramble fields and rocks that were either cracked or sculpted into razorlike corrugations. Slashed arches and bloody heels were epidemic; the irritation of broken, overgrown nails drove the soldiers to carve away at them with their sword points, causing as much damage as they relieved. Feet everywhere were caked with suppurating cuts that never had a chance to close; by night, their toes were covered with gnats that feasted on the blood.
The Lacedaemonians signaled their predicament by flashing messages on a polished shield to their superiors on the coast. Though little was getting through the Athenian blockade, Antalcidas pressed his brother to add a request for buskins. Epitadas refused; such a request would only disgrace him in the eyes of the generals. His estimate of Spartan empathy turned out to be dismally accurate: when the first helot swimmer got through from the mainland on the eighth day, he bore nothing-no food, no spare flints for fire-making-except a coded message. These dispatches, which looked like random marks at the edge of strips of parchment, were decoded by winding them around a wooden rod of a standard size. In this case Epitadas found the marks aligned into an aphorism: “Enemy skins make good buskins.”
If it ever rained on Sphacteria, Antalcidas saw no evidence of it. Dry leaves shed like the molt of reptiles from buckthorn and cistus; the grasses growing between the eruptions of rock bristled like broom heads. The only tolerable opportunity to chew thyme leaves was just after dawn, when the proportion of dew and salt spray was on the sweeter side. There were brambles in the hollows, and arbutus on the heights, and pine trees where the soil would take them. Here and there were a few spiny, spindly oaks, but these were dwarfed by the constant wind and offered little shade. And everywhere wafted the tendrils of broken spiderwebs, finding their way inevitably into eyes and mouths and beards. The spiders themselves seemed to have decamped for better quarters.
There were 420 Lacedaemonians on the island, including more than 200 Spartiates and an equal number of Nigh-Dwellers chosen by lot from all the battalions of the army. Helot retainers came to attend the citizens. This temporary population of more than six hundred made their base at an ancient redoubt on the northern summit. The fort lay in a shambles, the outline of its square tower barely discernible, its blocks stacked nowhere higher than six courses. Once, in the time of warlords and charioteers, it must have served as old King Nestor’s outpost against pirates. Now it barely cast a useful shadow.
There was a single source of water on Sphacteria, down on the flats in the center of the island. With the intervention of the Athenian fleet, Epitadas cut the water ration by half, and then halved it again as the surface of the water receded into the depths of the well. The food situation was dire: with no grain getting through and no significant game on the island, the troops were reduced to throwing rocks at birds, or scaling down the cliffs to collect eggs. The rocky soil begrudged them only a few insects.
The extreme exposure of their position, on a sunblasted rock with no heavy timber available and little soil to
